Exploring Empathy in Middle School Advisory

This week in Middle School Advisory, the Middle School boys and girls dug deeper into the concept of kindness and more specifically what empathy means and how to achieve it. Advisory started with the students splitting into groups and coming up with how they would survive with their group on a deserted island. They then played “kindness hot potato” where each student complemented someone else when they got the “hot potato” What followed was a in depth discussion of what empathy is and is not, and how it differs from sympathy. The students concluded that empathy involved “walking in someone else’s shoes” and completed advisory by decorating their own “shoe” and writing on the soles of the shoe what someone would find out about them if they walked in their shoes.